I'd like to add a few iconographical details to Jim's post on the so-called
Byzantine Christ.
Early images of Christ (3rd to 6th centuries) portray him with the hair
style, clothing and physiognomy of the place where the image was made. In
addition to Roman images (plump with short hair) and Byzantine (thin with
long hair), he's shown as a black man in Ethiopian Gospelbooks and as a
blue-eyed blond in the Book of Kells and other Irish Gospelbooks. It's
amusing that everyone made him look like themselves. But there's a political
expediency in settling on a standard image--makes it easier to recognize him
in art. I have the impression that the Church affirmatively wanted a
standardized image, but I don't know any of the details of how this actually
came about or why it was the Byzantine Christ that won out among a number of
other possibilities.
On the question of why artists didn't just "show him the way he really
looked," we have no descriptions of his physical appearance. The Bible is not
very visually oriented, and almost never goes into detail about what people
or places look like. Imagine the basic questions the police would ask if you
had seen a "perp" commit a robbery. How tall was the person? weight? hair,
eye, and skin color? They're trying to get at what the person looked like,
and this is precisely the kind of data that's in short supply in the Bible.
So artists were thrown on using their imagination, and, as above, in the
earliest efforts they gave him what they may have thought was a "normal"
appearance, an appearance somewhat like themselves.
pat sloane
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In a message dated 12-4-1999 1:10:01 PM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
> > I am perplexed as to why most images of Christ show him to have long
> > hair, when I Corinthians 11:14 (KJV) states:
> >
> > I Corinthians 11:14
> > Doth not even nature [phusis] itself teach you, that, if a man have
> > long hair [komao], it is a shame [atimia] unto him?
> >
> > More generally, I'm interested to know where I can learn about the
> > origins of historical and modern images of Christ.
>
> Dear Michael,
> The earliest images of Christ do, indeed, depict him as young and
> beardless, e.g. the 3rd-century catacomb paintings, and such images
> continued to appear until the 6th-century, eg. the apse mosaic in S.
> Vitale in Ravenna. But from the 4th-century onwards, the competing
> image of Christ as older, with long dark hair and beard, began to
> appear as well, and this image evenually replaced the earlier
> non-bearded type of image completely. The bearded type was
> evenually formalized in the Byzantine east as the image of Christ
> Pantocrator (ruler of all), and in fact, one theory has it that the
> long-haired and bearded image of Christ represents a tranference from
> a non-Christian image tradition, depicting the father of the gods,
> Zeus or Jupiter, who was, indeed, depicted in such a manner. My own,
> completely unsubstantiated (yet) opinion is that these two manners of
> representing Christ also had something to do with the increasing
> doctrinal importance of Christological and Trinitarian questions (for
> which, see this list`s Threatened Series by Bill East). For more on
> the subject of images, you might look at André Grabar, Christian
> Iconography: A Study of its Origins (Princeton, 1968), still a
> valuable work, and Thomas F. Mathews, The Clash of Gods: A
> Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton, 1993), an
> interesting but overstated re-evaluation of imperial influence on
> early Christian imagery (see the excellent review by Peter Brown in
> Art Bulletin, vol. 77 (1995), 499-502).
> Cheers,
> Jim Bugslag
>
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